Harley must have walked through this room, crammed with wooden tables and chairs, sawdust on the floor, maybe a thousand times, but ever since the night of the accident at sea he felt like things were different, like people were looking at him. At first, he was convinced they were all impressed — his picture had been in the papers, and the story he’d told was pretty amazing. Nobody else had made it out alive. But now, he got a different vibe.

Sometimes he felt like they were snickering at him behind his back.

“Hey,” he said as Russell squinted down the length of his pool cue. Eddie was leaning against the wall nursing a beer. Harley wondered if Angie had noticed him yet.

“Hey,” they both replied, but Russell, the quiet one, started methodically putting away the balls, while Eddie went off on one of his typical tears. “You see that California is going to legalize pot? You see where it’s going to be on the ballot and everything? Shit, I don’t know whether to go down there and plant a hundred acres of the shit, or get one of those medical dispensary licenses — they’ve got those in a lot of states now — where you’re allowed to sell the stuff and use it with no hassles. I mean, you tell me why the government gets to tell me what I can, and cannot, put in my own body. Where is that in the Constitution?”

With Eddie, most things eventually came back to the Constitution, which Harley was one hundred percent certain he had never read. Neither had Harley, of course, so for all he knew, it really did include a whole long list of things you could and could not put in your body. But right now, it seemed like a very good idea to put a beer in.

Angie was still handing out bottles and glasses. Her blond hair was all frizzed out, too, but it just made her look hot. She had a silver ring through her lower lip and a tattoo on her shoulder that said mick — the name of a guy she’d had a baby with when she was sixteen. Sometimes Harley would see the kid around town with his grandmother, who was raising him.

“You get in any more newspapers?” Eddie asked. “I swear, you should call up some of those TV shows, like Deadliest Catch.”

“Yeah,” Russell said, having just scratched on the cue ball, “you could reenact the shipwreck—”

“And maybe you could even get somebody to make a movie of it. You could buy yourself a new boat with the money.”

“And a new crew,” Russell said, “while you’re at it.”

Eddie laughed and clapped his hands together. “Yeah, man, and good luck with that!” He bent over double, laughing, and that’s when Harley realized how drunk he was. “They’ll be fighting for that gig.” Then he tried to line up his own shot and missed it altogether.

But this was exactly what Harley meant about the weird new vibe he got in town. At first it was all like, thank God the sea had spared even one, but then it started to be something else. People who knew him — and who didn’t in a town the size of Port Orlov? — looked at him sideways. Harley started to think that they didn’t believe him — at least not entirely. And when Lucas Muller’s dad had bumped into him at the lumberyard, he’d stared him down. Harley figured it was because he’d laid the blame on Lucas for the shipwreck. Harley had tried to stare back just as hard, but he lost. Then Muller handed him a leaflet that said there would be a memorial service for all the lost crewmen on the coming Sunday, at the town church.

“I expect they’ll want you to say a few words,” Muller said. “You think you can do that?”

He sounded like he didn’t think so, which was why Harley said, “Sure. No problem.”

The only reason the service had been put off so long was they were waiting to see how many bodies they could recover first. They’d found three — Lucas, Farrell, and that Samoan. Two others, Kubelik and Old Man Richter, were still missing.

Harley spotted Angie coming their way. She had a bowl of unshelled peanuts and three beers on the tray.

“Bring ’em on!” Eddie said, snaring two bottles and putting one of them aside for Russell, who was now back to shooting.

Angie handed the last one to Harley and said, “I hear you’re talking at the church next Sunday.”

“Yeah,” Harley said, “everybody’s been asking me to.” He threw ten bucks onto her tray.

“I’m getting off tonight at nine.”

“That right?” he stammered.

“Uh-huh. And my mom’s got little Mick.”

Why she’d named the baby after that creep, who hadn’t even stuck around long enough to see it get born, never failed to baffle Harley.

“I could come over,” she said.

“Sure,” Harley said, trying not to sound too eager. “I think I’ll be around.”

“Hey, Angie!” one of her customers called, waving an empty bottle. “We’re dry over here!” It was Geordie Ayakuk, who worked at the Inuit Community Affairs Center. Harley had never liked him, and liked him even less for breaking up his moment.

But once Angie was gone, and Eddie and Russell had tired of playing pool — with no money left to wager, they got bored fast — Harley was able to work his way around to what he’d come to talk to them about. At a table jammed between the jukebox and the men’s room door, they huddled over their beers and a bowl of unshelled peanuts while Harley did his best to pitch them his — or, more accurately, his brother Charlie’s — idea.

“I saw it myself, with my own eyes,” Harley said, as the two men listened closely. Eddie’s work shirt smelled like he hadn’t changed it since his last plumbing job, and Russell’s sleeves were rolled up to show the tattoo he’d given himself when he was in solitary at the Spring Creek Correctional Facility. It was supposed to be an eagle, but it had come out looking more like a bat.

“If you saw jewels, why didn’t you take them right then?” Russell said. “Before the ship went down?”

“Because I didn’t know that the ship was going to go down,” Harley explained, for the second time. “Obviously, if I’d known that, I’d have taken the damn thing then and there.” He did not consider it wise to let on that he’d actually snagged the cross; if he did, he’d have Eddie and Russell trying to rob him next.

“And you say it was what?” Eddie asked. “A necklace with emeralds in it?”

“Maybe. But like I said, it was hard to get a good look ’cause the crack in the lid wasn’t very big.”

“Maybe that was all that there is,” Russell said, cracking open another peanut. “What makes you think there’s more out there?”

“I don’t know,” Harley said. “I’m not making any promises. But if there’s other coffins popping out of the ground like this one did, then who knows what they’ve got inside?”

While Russell remained dubious, Eddie, Harley could see, was starting to get excited. “Didn’t you guys ever hear the stories?” Eddie said. “My uncle used to tell me about how there were these crazy Russians, a long time ago, who’d escaped from Siberia and settled out on the island because nobody could ever get to them there. They had a secret religion and lived there without any contact with the mainland.”

“How’d they get away with that?” Russell said. “That’s American territory.”

“Actually, it belonged by treaty to the fuckin’ natives around here,” Harley explained, “who saw enough wampum and said you can have it. And nobody’s gone there since because it’s got such a bad rep.”

“You mean because they all died out there?”

“Yeah,” Harley said. “And those black wolves don’t help any, either.” He could still see that alpha wolf, leaping up at his foot as the Coast Guard chopper hauled his frozen ass up off the beach. “Even the Inuit don’t go there because they say the place is haunted.”

“What a load of shit,” Russell said.

“Exactly,” Harley said, as convincingly as he could. “Exactly.” That yellow light could have been a total illusion. “It’s all bullshit. The real reason nobody goes out there is because it’s a bitch and a half just to find any way onto the island. Those rocks have fucked me up once already, and I do not mean to get fucked again.”